June 27, 2011

High-functioning princess (HFP)

A friend forwarded me an excerpt of a eulogy that the chief of Taiwan's Examination Yuan, Kuan Chung, delivered at his beloved daughter's funeral in May. I cried in the subway when I first read it, and teared up again watching the TV clip of his speech when I got home.

It seems universally acknowledged that the father-daughter bond is something special - terms like "daddy's girl" and "Jewish-American princess“ (JAP) come to mind.

Although Chinese fathers don't tend to be openly affectionate, the few that are, from what I have observed firsthand, are testament to the Chinese saying that fathers and daughters were lovers in their past lives. Not lovers in a Western sense, but lovers in a puritanical sense - certainly celibate, and often pining from afar, as befitting the protocol of dynastic China. And perhaps that's why in their present lives, daughters hold a special place in their fathers' hearts - not a son that's imperative to carry the family name, but a little girl to spoil for spoiling's sake. That's the feeling I got from Kuan Chung's eulogy.

Kuan Chung's daughter by all accounts was the pearl of her father's palm (掌上明珠). What surprised me when all the news stories of her suicide/accident (a fall from her 27th-floor Shanghai apartment) came out, was how talented and independent she was, growing up largely on her own in the U.S. and carving out a film career in the U.K.

Chinese expressions like the ubiquitous four-character idiom can be fun but also excruciatingly difficult to learn for foreigners without the cultural context. The bright-pearl-upon-palm idiom is one such case of lost-in-translation, so for a Western tongue I would substitute it with "high-functioning princess". For my attempt at coining a new term complete with an armchair psychologist's observations, HFPs are often:

first-born, so growing up, they basked in the attention of their fathers without any competition from siblings in their formative years

attractive, so the pattern they established with their fathers are replicated to some degree in their dating relationships, with the balance of power titling in their favor

self-sufficient and usually fiercely independent, these type-A personalities earn the adoration they subconsciously seek

Kuan Chung carrying his favorite photo of his daughter and her remains back to Taiwan